Power Outage February 26 2019

lulu5kamz

Known around here
Joined
Sep 14, 2015
Messages
1,128
Reaction score
3,599
This is the moment we lost power today for 13 hours. You can see 2 attempts were made to restore power, but both failed. The power was restored earlier this evening.

 

TonyR

IPCT Contributor
Joined
Jul 15, 2014
Messages
16,438
Reaction score
38,154
Location
Alabama
Yikes! Great video, Lulu.

Initially it looked like a transformer blew but the fact that there were fireworks twice more when the auto-recloser made its 2 attempts maybe it's a couple of overhead wires touching each other or a line down. There was a spark further to the right (xformer?), then the big stuff happened to the left (wires?). Makes no difference what it was.....PG&E has some work to do now.

We've had over 10 inches of rain the last 3 weeks and the earth is saturated. Mix in some shallow-rooted trees and high winds and you've got limbs and trees falling onto power lines all over the place here. We had two 90 minute outages Wed. the 20th (yay...my birthday!) and one 2 hour outage Sat. the 23rd. Its bound to happen when you live in the middle of a national forest and all the primaries are overhead. For esthetics I paid extra to have my secondary 120/240 run underground to the house from the xformer on the pole.

Got to witness operation of the auto-reclosers several times and run around and silence the beeping of 3 UPS's. Ran my 3000 watt propane generator all 3 times. It's just big enough to run some minimum lighting in living room, kitchen and master bath, satellite receiver and big screen, 'fridge and coffee pot in kitchen, garage 'fridge and door opener. I installed a manual transfer switch with 8 circuits about 8 years ago after the tornados of April 27, 2011 had us down for 4 days. It has been a lifesaver. The little guy starts on second pull, runs 8 hours on a 20 lb. LPG portable tank under full load. It'll sit for 6-8 months and then start easily; no gas to worry about going bad, gumming up carb, etc.
 
Top